michael
'Cause I carried on like the wayward son
And now through and through I have come undone
And now I am just but the wayward man
What with my bloodshot eyes and my shaky hands
'Cause I carried on like the wayward son
And now through and through I have come undone
And now I am just but the wayward man
What with my bloodshot eyes and my shaky hands
Another sad voice in the wind, in the dark. Another hour with the phoenix icy and still like a dead thing, cold wood in the fireplace, black wood that breathes only in dying embers. Another story where the crowd gathers in hushed silence at the edge of some oncoming tragedy. He wonders when Denocte will not be marked by some oncoming tragedy.
I'm coming with you. An echo. At first he thinks it is the wind again, the voice in the wood. At first it makes him jump. He turns to see Moira, carrying medical supplies. So they heard it too, the clustered few in the woods with Michael. This does not come as a comfort.
"I often ask myself that." These words too are sucked into the fog that looms, the fog that laughs. It is with a sense of finality that Michael watches it go, sinking into his bones like winter. He has a bad feeling about this.
He does not say he is going, does not have to, only turns back to meet Moira with a grim frown before he is carried into the fog by little more than the pain of not knowing.
--
A minute passes. Stones that he know give way to unfamiliar ground, unfamiliar trees.
Five minutes: He is breathing fog and gray. There are dips where he does not remember dips, knolls where there should not be knolls. He cannot hear anything but the keening of hell, or heaven, or some blank space in between. If he stops at all he stops here, the voice howling through him like a dark December wind.
He thinks, I could die here.
He thinks, I must go, or I will. Surely.
Hours? Days? The woods are an endless loop of hills and valleys, trees and fog, and Michael is Orpheus with his own heart ringing in his ears, the screaming of ghosts and the roaring of wind and his blood whistling where am I going? Where am I going? He cannot breathe through the heavy fog and he cannot tell if he is still moving or if the ground has not dropped out from beneath him. Wherever Moira is he can no longer find her, cannot turn, cannot speak, can only suck ragged, choking breaths, over and over by mechanical force.
Where am I going?
His heart is in his throat, choking him.
Where am I going?
He passes beneath the long fingers of a leafless tree, and its branches tug at his long mane. Or was that a tree at all?
Where am I going?
The ground beneath him trips, and traps, the air is heavy and damp and the trees are gone, the rocks are gone, every whff against his skin is a palm or a heart beating or a mouth full of hungry teeth, a long and desperate tongue. He is Orpheus marching out of Hades, fixed on the road ahead though he cannot see it, praying that Euridyce is somewhere in the black and the fog. Praying that Denocte, still, is somewhere in the black and the fog.
Where am I going?
He does not know. The voice in the wood is on all sides at once, bouncing off trees? Bouncing off the hollows of his body? He does not know. But he goes anyway.
---
Michael continues forward.
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